Last night, Mozilla’s Bugzilla bug tracker was updated to Bugzilla 3.2 with a lot of UI changes, some of which are improvements, others are not.

One of the things that struck me as weird is how all flags, resolutions, etc. moved to the top of the page, while the “commit” button remained at the bottom, by the comment field. That means to resolve a bug, you need to (including the additional click that is now needed to pick something from the resolutions dropdown list):

• Click on the “status” dropdown list
• Click on RESOLVED
• Scroll all the way down the page
• Click on Commit

So I decided to throw a quick Greasemonkey user script together to put an additional commit button to the top of the page (just so we can drop the scrolling part), like this:

And here’s the script for your enjoyment:
bugzilla-commit.user.js (click to install)

(Please note, it remotely imports jquery from jquery’s google code repository; that’s probably something that should change in version 0.2 ).

Update: It seems, this patch has been upstreamed and deployed at least on the Mozilla bugzilla instance. That makes this user script obsolete. In a good way

Today was the last day at Mozilla for Alex Polvi, web ninja and one of my favorite colleagues at the OSU Open Source Lab and later at Mozilla.

But it wouldn’t be our Alex if he didn’t leave with a bang, so he made a “Hampster Dance” style website named “Foxkeh Dance”, featuring the cute Japanese Firefox mascot “Foxkeh” and celebrating 10 years of Mozilla along with 10 years of Hampster Dance:

I just warn you, if you’re like me, you’ll have trouble getting that catchy tune out of your head for the rest of the day — much like the first time when you looked at Hampster dance back in the 90s.

Take care, Alex, and I hope our paths will cross again sooner rather than later!

I was just checking out a website with JavaScript disabled, then surfed over to facebook (accidentally) without switching JS back on, where I was welcomed with the following page (click on it to see it in its full beauty):

I love how gracefully they degrade to… an empty page…

Relying on JavaScript completely and just not returning a page at all if you don’t have it is a no-go in web development. At the very least, you should display a page stating why your services can’t be used without a particular technology, and provide hints on how to fix that.

Probably, the empty page only occurs because I logged in with JS enabled, then returned to the page with it disabled, but still it’s not a great user experience either way.

Depending on the software architecture, it is even relatively easy to provide a working page for “no script” users while keeping fancy JavaScript elements.

At AMO, we make an effort to keep all public parts of the website accessible to non-JS users as well so that the site can be used by the widest audience possible, and the development effort is far smaller than I imagined, due to language constructs like <noscript> that allow displaying buttons etc. that wouldn’t be needed in the “AJAXy” version of the page.

When I look at this, I hope facebook was not infected by its evil German stepchild “StudiVz”, as far as code quality is concerned. That apparent facebook clone, when it was first introduced, was infamous for its numerous, severe shortcomings in such minor regards as security, privacy, user experience, and probably a number of other important buzzwords as well (also stated by Facebook themselves in the context of their intellectual property lawsuit against StudiVZ: “As with any counterfeit product, Studivz’s uncontrolled quality standards for service, features and privacy negatively impact the genuine article.”, but I am digressing…)

Uhm, no, thanks.

(Update: A few people have wondered if I did not install Silverlight merely because it is produced by Microsoft. This is not the case, as you can read in more detail in the discussions in the comments to this article. Thanks.)